Portable USA PU-10WB Wireless Digital Frame Review

The PU-10WB sold by Portable USA is an elegant wooden frame. The frame is wireless via bluetooth technology and features speakers for music playback as well as a remote to guide you through the menus. A bluetooth adapter is not included in the box, but can be shipped to you free after filling out a postcard and submitting it to Portable USA.

THE HARDWARE
The construction of the frame is good. Its display is protected by a glass over a matted frame that hides the infrared sensor for the remote. The frame accepts SD/MMC/MS/CF cards as well as USB memory sticks, and the bluetooth adapter that uses the USB port. It can also be plugged in to any PC or Mac to have images transferred over to its 256 MB of on-board memory. The bluetooth is useful for transferring pictures from your phone and makes it fairly easily. All in all it is pretty solid in the media format acceptance category.

THE SET UP
As far as simplicity the frame passed the test. When the unit arrived for review we plugged it in and inserted an SD card with some mp3 files and some jpg image files of our Service Villa annual picnic and instantly the pictures started to display. A couple of seconds after the images started, the mp3s begun playing in the background. The whole process took no more than 30 seconds.
As far as simplicity the frame passed the test. When the unit arrived for review we plugged it in and inserted an SD card with some mp3 files and some jpg image files of our Service Villa annual picnic and instantly the pictures started to display. A couple of seconds after the images started, the mp3s begun playing in the background. The whole process took no more than 30 seconds.

THE DISPLAY
The 10.4 inch display is really bright and clear.

The test images we used were all taken with a 12 megapixel Nikon D300, so they were high resolution to begin with. We enjoyed the quality of the pictures being represented as they appeared with little or no distortion. The colors were actually better than we had expected, with nice saturation and decent blacks. Unfortunately the audio playback failed to impress us as the quality of the speakers was not great.

These pictures don't do the frame justice as it was hard to capture a screen shot that would show the quality of the display when showing off the pictures. If you are interested in purchasing I would get a memory card ready with some of your favorite pictures and take it to BJ's Wholesale club, Ritz Camera or Circuit City. All three of these stores carry the Portable USA line of digital frames. Once you have decided which one you like, go to Amazon and purchase it there since it is much cheaper.

The frame can also play videos of the following formats MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, AVI, and DivX. If you really wanted to you could probably watch a full length film as long as it fits in your memory card.

THE INTERFACE
Looking deeper into the frame's inner workings we found ourselves looking at a not-so-nice user control panel.

The user interface lacks the crisp-looking graphics you should expect from a fancy digital frame. and it was somewhat difficult to navigate through the menu using the buttons on the frame itself. The full function remote however takes care of this problem. You can actually do more things with the remote than you can with the on-board buttons. The only thing we found the on-board buttons useful for was raising and lowering the audio volume on the frame.

The menu offers you all the necessary controls such as language (Chinese, English, Dutch, French, and Spanish), speed for slide show and transition type selection. You can choose transitions that range from: slide from the top towards the bottom, fade in and out, open like a door, or random, which is what we used to make use of all the transitions. Your clock could be set from the control panel along with a one time use alarm to remind you of something or wake you up in the morning. We didn't find the alarm useful because it has to be set every day since it is linked with the date on the frame.

We tried putting the frame in portrait view but there is no option in the setup to do this. You can have all your pictures in either portrait or landscape but your menu will always be in landscape. This makes it a bit hard to see the calendar, alarm clock, mp3 audio player etc...

The PU-10WB has a list price of $249.00, but we have seen them on Amazon for about $149.99.

THE GOOD
- Nice bright display
- Speaker to listen to audio mp3 files
- Full function remote control (priceless)
- Somewhat easy to use (if you use the remote)
- Good price in comparison to similar models
- Bluetooth compatibility is great.

THE BAD
- Alarm clock not very useful to have to set it daily
- Cheap looking setup / menu interface
- Good luck figuring out how to use the menus if you loose the remote.
- Sound from speakers is not so great.
- No ability to make menu display in portrait mode.